Mann’s Complaint Joins the Conversation


An Interview with Randall Mann, Author of Complaint in the Garden | By Sarah Goldstein and Annie Mark

 

 

Last year the Kenyon Review and Zoo Press announced Randall Mann as the winner of the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry. Although the process of completing Complaint in the Garden (Mann’s first book of poetry, published by Zoo Press as part of the award) took ten years, fortunately it took us less than a year to interview him. First, however, we had to make a trip to the corner coffee shop. It is only at Middle Ground, once he is assured his morning cup of coffee, that we gain our first insight into Mann’s affability.

He pays for our coffee as well as his own—a gesture indicative of his accessibility throughout the day at the various events that KR has planned for him; a gesture not surprising from a man whose poems testify to his own humility; a gesture anticipated of a man who attempts, in a way, to redefine humanity in his first book of poetry. Despite all his easygoing friendliness, Mann maintains an urban feel, his fashionable attire and smart wristwatch starkly contrasting rural Gambier and the Florida landscapes of Complaint in the Garden.

In the interview, we discuss homosexual Biblical imagery, sex clubs, and pantoums. In poetry it is the “authentic” that is most important to Mann, and in his first book of poems, Mann has indeed provided us with such authenticity through frank sex, tender love, and the Florida rain. Although some poems, such as “Eros,” which takes place in a darkened sex club, have shocked some readers, Mann still seems to find that idea absurd. However, he is happy to discuss ideas of the “radical.”

For Mann, “joining the conversation” is the best part of publishing his first book. Mann shies away from the idea of a large readership, maintaining that he only wants, in the words of James Merrill, “one perfect reader.”



The Kenyon Review: Congratulations on being chosen for the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry. You begin your first book of poetry with the poem “?,” which serves almost as a preface. The speaker hangs up his overcoat and announces that this question mark “has trouble in mind.” Are you asking questions in this book that have trouble in mind?

Randall Mann: I suppose so. I put the poem “?” first in order to frame this as a book of scrutiny: of love, of landscape, of allusion. I think of tradition and the individual talent, Eliot. There's a sentence of his that says, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” If a poet assumes this truth, he must ask questions—and questions upset folks’ delicate ideas of order.

KR: While we’re on the topic of questions, two of the themes that interest me the most in your book are sexuality, or homosexuality, and religion. By exploring these themes in your poetry, what was your purpose: simply to explore, to teach, or to discover something?

RM: Well, I’m definitely not trying to teach anyone anything. Many of the poems are “personal explorations,” but I have to put this phrase in scare quotes because it sounds so reductive and horrific. This book was written in my twenties, much of it in a dark time, the early 1990s, when I came out of the closet, when there was no AIDS combination therapy, and sex and silence were equated with death.

KR: What is your religious background? Did you grow up Catholic?

RM: No, my mother is a lapsed Catholic, if one can say that, but I grew up relatively agnostic. My family said a small prayer before meals when I was very young, but I came home from school one day and that had been vetoed, perhaps by my father, I don't know. Many of the poems in Complaint in the Garden are about Florida, its history—and therefore the influence of Catholicism and empire and the longing for conversion.

KR: In "Old Haunts" and "Easter, 1996," the speaker is a teacher who is afraid his students will find out he is gay; many of your poems present a young, gay male speaker. To what extent may we read those poems to be autobiographical?

RM: You can take all of them as autobiographical, just as you can take none of them. I'm less concerned with the actual truth than a kind of emotional authenticity. I don't particularly care what “really” happened; actual truth is the stuff of journal entries or those little paragraphs at the back of The Best American Poetry. For the purposes of art, if the poem’s argument, which is the only truth that matters, is not an intricate lie in which a reader entertains belief, then the poem will fail.

KR: Moving on to form: you use many traditional poetic forms in your book: the villanelle, the pantoum, the sonnet, and a number of others. Why do you choose to use these forms and how do you feel about writing about such issues as AIDS and homosexuality in such a classic format?

RM: I don't find traditional forms constraining—I find them liberating. Form helps me approach more comfortably the personal, helps me harden argument. For example, I have a sestina about a sex club: the speaker cruises around the place again and again; the form turns to the same words again and again; hopefully, form becomes content. Perhaps writing in form makes me unfashionable, but it's sort of fun to be unfashionable and writing about gay porn and sex clubs.

KR: I was particularly impressed by your pantoum. They are extraordinarily difficult to write and I admire your search in the poem for the right word to describe a significant other.

RM: It's an old story, finding the right word to describe a loved one. It's not just a queer thing, but my experience is a queer experience, and that’s that. And it's interesting too how language, as rich as it is, fails us, which it does, which it will always do.

KR: You mentioned the form as a facet of content, which calls to mind the Modernists. Have they influenced you? What are your greatest influences?

RM: Certainly, the Modernists. Absolutely. In terms of influence, though—well, let me narrow it down a bit, let’s say to contemporary poets I have been rereading lately, Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Bishop and Donald Justice, in particular the late poems of these three. Late Larkin has a wrenching authenticity that is almost difficult to read; it is so pure and has so much longing. In a way, his sadness and hardness become a kind of wisdom. There’s that lovely poem “The Winter Palace” that ends, “My mind will fold into itself like fields, like snow.” And what I find beautiful is that he protests against knowledge in such a moving way that it becomes a kind of knowledge. That late poem “Aubade,” which I think is as good as poetry gets, and “Love Again”: these are the poems that break my heart. And Larkin’s lines—¬as well as Bishop’s and Justice’s lines—are clear and incredibly precise. J. D. McClatchy once wrote that great poems are “puzzles that remain dreams,” which I love; I can come back to many of the later poems by Larkin or Bishop or Justice and they still puzzle me, they remain dreamlike. Also, poems I love make new the world. And by “make new the world,” I mean they complicate the world. And by “complicate the world,” I mean they sort of darken it. (I don’t think anything is ever complicated and made happier.) There’s that great poem by Larkin, too, “The Trees.” The last line of the first stanza, “Their greenness is a kind of grief,” is as concise a description of great poems as I can think of.

KR: You brought up complicating the world through poetry and beauty and plainness. In one of my favorite poems in your book, “The Beauty of Things,” you recreate creation in a radical, gay way. Can you speak about that poem and how it affected you in writing it? Why did you write it and what does it mean to you?

RM: I wanted to tell an open, erotic fable of sorts; I have never thought of a single word I have written as “radical.” There’s something in fact rather everyday about embracing someone and caring for him and loving him in the face of adversity, even if the adversity is grand and mythological. If tenderness between two men is radical—and I suppose it is—then the shameful world needs a new radicalism.

KR: Let’s talk about another poem, “Eros,” set in a sex club. One might find the homoeroticism shocking. How much is shock value part of your poetry?

RM: I have no use for shock value. “Eros” is not really about the act of sex, which I do not in fact discuss in detail in the poem, but about the longing for it, the actual and emotional currency of sex in this context, the accessories of sex. Sex is almost an afterthought.

KR: Have you ever found it uncomfortable publishing such sexually charged, personal poems? Do you consider what it means to put them out to the general public? Have you been concerned what your family might think?

RM: I hope never to be America’s feel-good gay spokes-poet, and I think this line of questioning is code for “gay shame,” which I don’t feel too terribly much of. I have written my scandalous little poems and placed them in good magazines; I was fortunate enough to win a prize. And when I sent Complaint in the Garden to my parents, my mother phoned me and very sweetly said, “Well, there are some things about you which I may not have needed to know, just as there some things about me that you don’t need to know.” And then she told me how much she liked the poems about birds and the plants. . . .

KR: You have talked about—I’m going to throw this word at you and see what you think—a responsibility to be authentic. Do you think authors have responsibilities? Is your role more defined or important as a minority voice?

RM: Responsibility sounds like a chore, and art should never be a chore. It also sounds like preening, looking for a large audience. Once, when James Merrill was interviewed, he was asked if he’d like a larger audience. He said no, not really, and then declared he wanted “one perfect reader.” That sounds about right to me. I don’t imagine lecterns or audiences or interviews when I think of poetry. If I have to imagine a reader, I imagine one person looking at one poem, that person engaged and open. That’s all that I want.

KR: This is a basic question, but I really am curious. When did you start writing and why do you keep writing? What is your drive as a writer?

RM: When I was a kid in Lexington, Kentucky, I wrote little plays in which I would force my sister to act¬—she was my starlet. There were poems, or what I imagined were poems, that I wrote, starting in grade school. In high school I published my first poem in the school literary magazine, which was called, I kid you not, “Conversations with the Wind.” And then there was college and graduate school, and lots of poetry workshops. I had warm and generously harsh teachers. I continue to write because I am a writer, and I’m afraid I can’t explain that any more complexly or less tautologically.

KR: So did you study poetry both as an undergraduate and graduate student?

RM: Yes, at the University of Florida.

KR: Your book examines AIDS, race, and religion, yet on the back of the book, Henri Cole calls them “poems of Florida.” How did this project evolve to include all of these aspects? Why Florida as well as AIDS, race, religion?

RM: Florida is such an amazing, overwhelming landscape, it almost begged to be written about. Besides, landscape, the background, and issues of import, the foreground, are not mutually exclusive; when one writes a poem about AIDS, and one writes it in Florida, or sets it in Florida, then it is still a poem of Florida, no?

KR: Some of the comments about your book regard how the poems hold together“as a book” rather than just a random collection of poems. Can you tell us a little about the process of compiling this book of poetry? Surely you had many poems that you left out.

RM: I wrote my first poem in the book in 1993 and Complaint in the Garden came out in 2004; I sent the ever-changing manuscript to contests and publishers for many years; I published all but one of the poems in magazines. It was a rich, often maddening experience. But I’m incredibly privileged to make the art I want to make and lucky that someone noticed.

KR: Obviously you’ve benefited from literary competitions. Do you think contests such as this one are essential to aspiring authors?

RM: Literary prizes are all alike: a nonwinner dismisses them until he wins one, when he greedily declares, “Oh, contests are wonderful!” I am no different. So few presses publish poets, especially first-book poets, that the broad network of contests has become indispensable. There’s nothing more romantic than being a poet; there’s nothing less romantic than getting a book of poems published, and then “marketing” the thing, because selling is selling, even if the evening ends in a bookstore, pen in one hand, a mediocre Pinot Noir in another.

KR: How has the publication of your first book affected you, first as a human being who has a book published, but also as a writer? How has it affected your current writing? Or does it?

RM: I am indescribably happy that the book won the Kenyon Review Prize, is published, is beautifully made, and is getting reviewed. Other than that, my life is exactly the same. The publication has no effect on the poems I am writing now. I have a small body of work that will, one of these years, become the next book—but I’m in no hurry. I still have a healthy fear that the next poem will not come, which I nurse.

KR: Your poem “Angel in Florida” is dedicated to the poet Angel Cuadra. What connection or interest do you have with Cuadra and/or Cuba?

RM: The connection is a literary connection; I am Latino but not Cuban. I have read and admired his work.

KR: Do you want to offer any thoughts on Cuba?

RM: [laughs] Lift the embargo?

KR: “The sea is rising and the world is sand.” This is the last line of your book. It seems like a natural conclusion after all the rain and flood imagery.

RM: That’s actually a line from Wilfred Owen, which I found, when I read the fragment from which it’s taken, lovely, suggestive, strange, and slightly inscrutable. My hope is that, for the last poem, as well as for the book itself, it paradoxically ties things up and unties things—both provide adequate closure to both and an opening out of the book, maybe into the next one.

KR: You have so much rain and water imagery in your poems. Why so much water imagery in your poetry?

RM: Well, it rained a lot in Florida, and since I am only so imaginative I wrote about what I knew, what I know—which is, apparently, among other things, lots and lots of water.

KR: You have published your first book; you have mentioned that you’re still writing. What do you hope to accomplish as a writer?

RM: In a recent issue of Poetry there was an essay by W.S. DiPiero, a wonderful essay about the process of writing, not just getting lost in the process but losing oneself in that process, the sublime experience of time lost in the making of art. This is what I hope for as I write one poem at a time.